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I can't seem to find a way to link to pages containing non-Latin characters in URLs.

For example, Tåg.info (with an å). The å is required, since tag.info is a completely different website.

Using the normal link mechanism (Ctrl+L) doesn't allow me to publish the post, I receive a message

Your post contains the invalid external link http://t%C3%A5g.info. Please correct it.

I can't even paste the URL directly in the text either. Very frustrating.

My browsers don't have an issue with this escaped URL though (Firefox 18 and Chrome version-of-the-day).

I've seen this other related question, but this doesn't work either:

 [Tåg.info](http://tåg.info)

As a workaround, I can use the Punycode version

[Tåg.info](http://xn--tg-yia.info/)

however Firefox does the conversion to and from Punycode transparently, so there's no easy way to generate this URL, and obviously it's not very user-friendly. Chrome doesn't, though, so internationalized URLs result in Punycode.

In case it's important, this is for a post on Travel-SE, and links to non-English websites are not uncommon.

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  • From the question you linked: "This is comment-only at the moment. There's nothing inherently problematic with doing the same thing in posts (i.e. questions and answers), and we may do it at some point..." - So, this would be more of a feature-request since, according to that post, it's not supposed to work like that (unless that's just out-of-date).
    – animuson StaffMod
    Dec 12, 2012 at 16:19
  • 3
    @animuson: I kind of see where you are coming from, but for me this is a clear bug: "I can't include a valid URL that my browser understands perfectly in a SE post." The reason why is irrelevant -- IDNs have been around for some years now.
    – mindcorrosive
    Dec 12, 2012 at 16:45

1 Answer 1

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Using the normal link mechanism (Ctrl+L) doesn't allow me to publish the post, I receive a message

Your post contains the invalid external link http://t%C3%A5g.info. Please correct it.

That part is where the bug is (the rest of the behavior is intentional). There was a typo in the link validator that would only accept this URL if the domain's first character is non-ASCII as well.

Fixed in the next build.

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